Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Archive...

I don’t believe I was “demonizing” anyone.

One ought to focus on civility which can only be grounded in language/civilization designed to unfold providentially in all those created in the "imago dei" unless that is non longer possible based on reason.

Note that there is little difference between the concept of demoniac or maniac, in fact history shows that one was simply reclassified into the other based on a shift in worldview towards naturalism with little to no actual empirical evidence. There is still little evidence that brain lesions or a manifestly physical "illness" can cause highly complex actions which mimic intelligent agency. There is still just as little reason for the judgment "Not guilty by 'reason' of insanity." as "Not guilty by reason of the Devil made me do it." (Note the irony typical to both claims, at any rate.)

The only ground we have for doing away with both concepts is by admitting intelligent design and focusing on it in a systematic way. As David Stove notes of "puppetry theories":

...just as Calvin divides created things into potent demons and causally impotent everything else, so Dawkins divides the organic world into potent genes and causally impotent everything else. According to Calvinism, we are pawns in a game, in which the only real players are the demons and God. According to The Selfish Gene, we are pawns in a game in which the only real players are genes. [....]I do not believe that humans are the helpless puppets of their genes, and cannot even take that proposition seriously. Why? Because I have heard far too many stories like that one before, and because it is obvious what is wrong with all of them. "Our stars rule us," says the astrologer. "Man is what he eats," said Feuerbach. "We are what our infantile sexual experiences made us," says the Freudian. "The individual counts for nothing, his class situation for everything," says the Marxist. "We are what our socioeconomic circumstances make us," says the social worker. "We are what the Almighty God created us," says the Christian theologian. There is simply no end to this kind of stuff. What is wrong with all such theories is this: That they deny, at least by implication, that human intentions, decisions, and efforts are among the causal agencies which are at work in the world. This denial is so obviously false that no rational person, who paused to consider it coolly and in itself, would ever entertain it for one minute. ....The falsity of all these theories of human helplessness is so very obvious, in fact, that the puppetry theorists themselves cannot help admitting it, and thus are never able to adhere consistently to their puppetry theories. Feurerbach, though he said that man is what he eats, was also obliged to admit that meals to not eat meals. The Calvinistic theologian, after saying that the omnipotent Creator is everything and his creatures nothing, will often then go on to reproach himself and other creatures with disobeying this Creator. The Freudian therapist believes in the overpowering influence of infantile sexual experiences, but he makes an excellent living by encouraging his patients to believe that, with his help, this overpowering influence can be itself overpowered. And so on. In this inevitable and tiresomely familiar way, Dawkins contradicts his puppetry theory...(Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolutionby David Stove :176-184)